We ♥ web applications!

Mobalean is lead by Henri Servomaa, the original founder and mobile developer.
At Mobalean we strive to develop services which are loved by our clients and users.
By working in an agile manner, quickly adapting to changing requirements,
we can deliver quickly and often.

Henri Servomaa

Hailing from Finland, Henri has a long history with computers and the internet.
With a background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he has worked
in Japan as Software Developer and System Admin since 2001. In 2005, he joined a
company to develop mobile sites for the Japanese market and has been involved in mobile ever since.

Contractors

Cleve Lendon is a Canadian engineer who has been contracting for Mobalean. He came to Tokyo in 1994, and has lived here ever since.
He has broad experience as a software developer, which includes development of mainframe software,
Internet applications and mobile apps (Android and iOS).
He is especially skilled at writing Java applications (vd. Simredo 4, Grafikilo 15).
When not programming, Cleve enjoys improv acting and studying languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.

Mobalean Alumni

Paul McMahon and Michael Reinsch were co-founders of Mobalean. They have moved to Doorkeeper KK, a company they established in 2013. Both are now actively developing the doorkeeper platform.

Web Development

Our strength is crafting web services for both Japanese and international markets.
We bring our technical and cultural experience to help you adapt your ideas into successful products.

We develop with Ruby on Rails and use the best agile practices and tools,
such as test driven development and continuous integration to achieve quality.

Japanese Mobile Consulting

We are the leading provider of technical expertise about the Japanese mobile web. Mobalean started when the smartphones were just appearing on the market.
Our Keitai Web Technology Guide
is a quick starting point for learning about the initial challenges of Japanese mobile development. Although the technology stacks have changed since the proliferation of iOS and Android, some of the idiosyncrasies remain. Most notably, the Japanese market is still very much dominated by the big three carriers: DoCoMo, au and Softbank.
Developers can find more technical details in our Keitai-Dev Wiki.

A Step Towards Internationalizing the Japanese Ruby Community

Aaron Patterson’s opening keynote at this year’s RubyKaigi once again raised the issue of communication between Japanese and international Rubyists. This topic also came up in Akira Matsuda’s and Shintaro Kakutani’s presentations. I also gave a lightning talk where I presented some ideas for creating globally minded Japanese Rubyists. Helping to address the issues raised in these presentations is a goal I am working towards.

A key part in internationalizing the local community is involving Japan’s foreign residents. At last night’s asakusa.rb meetup, I was impressed that all the speakers gave presentations in English. Having around five foreigners listening was enough of an impetus for Japanese to speak in English, something that wouldn’t have happened if all participants were Japanese.

With Tokyo Rubyist Meetup, we are creating an opportunity for Japanese and non-Japanese Rubyists to get together. However, it will take more than a meetup every couple of months to create real change within the community. With that in mind, I created a survey for “Rubyを使っての英語学習”, asking participants for feedback on how they would like to combine using Ruby and learning English.

The result shows that people are most interested in interactive activities, such as pair programming or a workshop, in a small group or one-on-one basis. As a trial of this, I’ve created Drop in Ruby 英会話, which will have up to four participants come to our office, where we will talk about and use ruby together. By running this event in a casual manner, I hope to be able to adapt the session to the participants individual skill levels, and to get a better idea of how we can continue with this approach in the future.

Like learning a language, the most important thing in making the community more global is to try. As such, I intend to continue to explore different paths we can take to internationalization. Continued feedback from everyone is welcome. You can find me on Twitter as @pwim.